After April’s meeting of AR managers from across Europe, two meetings have launched the Institute for Industry Analyst Relations. After just a few months, the two chapters have around 100 members.

The British meeting opened with a discussion about the recent reorganisation of Gartner, which involves splitting out Dataquest again and increased verticalisation. The general consensus of the group was that the new structure was not well understood but that it was probably intended to generate new revenue streams for Gartner which is under pressure to demonstrate the value to shareholders of its acquisition of META. Several people also highlighted that Gartner has just raised its prices for SAS days by 20%. There was a suggestion that Gartner may be trying to reduce the amount of time its analysts spend on the road doing SAS days to increase the number of reports written – analysts are no longer compensated for SAS days.

The meetings also agreed a timeline for the first 12 months of the organisation. It was decided that the IIAR will meet every two months initially. Our next meeting will be on Thursday September 7, 2006. Three members were elected to act as the IIAR’s board: myself and colleagues from Dell and Oracle.

Finally, the group discussed the need to set up a number of additional task forces to progress several key areas. These include:
• Ethics
• Measurement
• Best Practice
• Analyst task force, to discuss issues faced by members in working with individual analyst firms and recommend an appropriate IIAR official response
• Training, to discuss and make recommendations for IIAR accreditation of training courses and how the IIAR will work with training providers.

We need volunteers to participate in these task forces so if you would like to get involved, please join us at http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/analystrelations/.

The German chapter of the IIAR, the DARA, has been established as a working group for German-speaking analyst relations to network and develop common work. The German working group pursues the goal of promoting an active dialogue between AR managers and AR consultants working in a range of technology enterprises. In particular, the working group will be a voice for all those who are active in the analyst relations field.

The membership of the German working group is accessible to all those who who have a vocational interest in analyst relations; only employees of the analyst firms cannot become members. The working group can be found online at http://de.groups.yahoo.com/group/AR-Arbeitskreis. The next meeting of DARA will be in Munich in September (the date has yet to be confirmed, but may be at 2pm on Tuesday the 19th).

P.S. Gartner were due to increase prices in June – that is now delayed. Thanks to Paul at Dell for pointing that out.